


Earl Grey it is Then

by Freudhood



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Post-First War with Voldemort, minerva is a fucking saint and her tea cures all illness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2019-11-10
Packaged: 2021-01-27 04:06:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21385813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Freudhood/pseuds/Freudhood
Summary: They had stayed side by side, Remus and her, the survivors, under the hottest skies and the coldest storms. She had stood under his umbrella as he had held her elbow, never commenting on the salted drops that would sometimes manage to break through the veil and spells that were supposed to keep their bodies dry. Those were the ones that stained his clothes and left marks he wanted to burn away with bleach. Throw in a fire, watch the flames, then step into them.“Do you need anything?” Minerva asks, now, basked in the morning light of his tiny room, her hands clasped in front of her dark robes.-It’s ten years after James and Lily’s death and Minerva pays a visit to Remus the morning after a full moon.
Relationships: Remus Lupin & Minerva McGonagall, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin, mentioned
Comments: 1
Kudos: 26





	Earl Grey it is Then

**Author's Note:**

> I’m just emo over these two I can’t even begin to explain how much I’ve been thinking about Minerva being the reason why Remus stayed alive after the death of everyone. She saved him. So here’s a little piece of writing to honor her existence.

The bed creaks as he tries to turn around, grey streaks of light catching his closed eyelids. He can almost feel the last spots of full moon disappearing from the sky as the skin settles back on his bones, the tension in his flesh vibrating form head to toes. It’s always been the goodbyes that hurt the most with transformations. When everything is supposed to be back in place, flesh and hair, yet all he can feel is the fantom memory of claws, sharp teeth, third and fourth legs, larger nostrils that smell everything in a 50 miles radius. Remus won’t feel human for a long time. Too long in his mind.

So he tries to sleep as long as he can, hidden in the warmth of his itchy covers and woolen socks, trying to ignore how later his feet will have to take him in town to search for another job and his tongue will work around another lie.  
But for now, the only thing he cares about is the feeling of his dry throat and the stars behind his eyes.

-

He barely hears the knock at the door. When did it start? He fumbles around blindly, looking for his wand to uncharm the locks on his door. Once it’s done the knocking stops. “Come in.” He manages hoarsely and, clearing his throat, he shifts slightly in the bed in order to straighten up and not look like a corpse laid in its coffin. His elbows shake and hurt like broken wings and he winces at the pain that shoots up in his left hip. It seems like it’s gonna be another cute month between him and his cane.

Then the door opens and he hides everything behind a wall of stone. The only trace of hardship left on his face travels to the lines around his mouth. Embed in skin, sculpted with a needle-like precision, they haven’t left his visage in years. Sometimes, when he looks in the mirror, they feel like strangers he doesn’t recognize. They settled there without asking for his permission, some went around his eyes and others on his forehead. What can a man do against such ruthless travelers of time who decided that his face would become their last destination? The mirror only shows what age looks like once it loses its charm, he knows, but how sad it feels to not recognize one’s own self.

His thoughts are interrupted by the creaking of the wooden floor and so, despairingly, tired eyes look up and crinkle humorlessly at the sight of Minerva.

She looks ready to face the day even though it’s barely 7am, and if he didn’t feel like death right now, he would joke about the fact that no one should have the right to look so fresh at the crack of dawn.

“Good morning Remus, I hope you don’t mind an early visit.” She says and boy he missed her. From her sparkly eyes to the reading glasses held around her neck by a silver chain, the feeling of his heart swelling in his chest makes Remus nearly throw up on spot.

His adoration must show on his face because he has barely enough time to feel pale that Minerva is already at his side, his own shoulder secured under her strong hand.

“Are you alright?” She asks with a frown and he knows that she probably feels stupid asking this. He knows he would. But then he always feels stupid, and that’s probably the kind of feeling Minerva is not used to experiencing. After all she’s the most talented and clever witch he has ever met and that’s a lot to say.

Remus replies with a silent nod and a raised hand, laying down slowly in order to allege the weight on his elbows. Once it’s done he sighs and readjusts the covers on top of his chest.

“I’m fine Minerva, I was just thinking about the last time we saw each other.”

She raises two thin eyebrows at his explanation and, with a light squeeze that he nearly thinks he imagined, she takes her hand off his shoulder. “It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

Remus shrugs. It has been a few months, if not more than a whole year, but she’s been busy and he’s been traveling a bit so it’s normal they haven’t had time to see each other. Yet he misses her and London and their Wednesday afternoons spent bitching about Severus. They have so much to catch on, and maybe he’s not the only one thinking that.   
  


But today is not the day. Today Remus feels stuck between two worlds and he doesn’t understand why he’s having so many flashbacks. It’s probably because Minerva will always bring a bit of past with her wherever she goes.   
  


“Let’s make it up for the lost times then,” she sighs and Remus nods, ears ringing because that’s the sentence he imagines himself saying to the ghosts of his friends when he dies and meets them in the afterlife. “How has it been with Lily’s birthday?” Her soft voice brings a forgotten picture to his mind.

In Sixth Year he remembers they all used to joke about how Lily would become the new Gryffindor Head House once McGonagall retired, or became the new Headmaster. It was in the way she commanded students back to their beds after curfews, the way she stood side by side with the professors, her shoulders always high and somehow at their level, no matter the differences in hierarchy. She would always find a way to make herself taller than her tiny funny 5’4’’. No one doubted her decisions, no one dared to speak up, even when the war struck and she was asked to patch up holes created by red blasts, her voice was the only one that ever had the last words.

“Honestly it’s been worse.” Remus says in an exhale and his eyes follow her as she moves around the room, probably taking in the whole mess that is his life. “I put flowers on her grave, had a few beers and cried.” The blinds are drawn but you can clearly see how the kitchen, the bedroom and the living room are gathered in that one room that she stands in. There’s stale bread on his sink and dirty silverware in it. There are clothes lying on the floor and fighting huge piles of books that Remus can’t fit anymore in his tiny bookshelf. As he watches her graceful form taking in the place, Remus wonders if she thinks of him as a miserable lost soul?

And if so, did she ever feel pity for him, after what happened?

A blurry memory of him sitting in her office, less than a week later after James and Lily and Peter’s funeral. No sleep, strength or love left in his bones, she had offered him to stay at her place.

“My wife won’t mind,” she had said and he realizes now, with bitter irony, that his lack of reaction on the moment about this marital information spoke louder than words about his mental state back then. Sirius would have jumped through every windows of the castle if he had known, yelling about his dear old Minnie not loving him back, shards of glittery affection making his heart swell with admiration. His Minerva was married!

Other people than Remus would probably wonder why she never told anyone about it. They would want to know, in a quite awful curiosity, what other kind of secrets she had hidden inside her sleeves. Remus understood. No words or explanations were needed. Secrets were blessed and dangerous little things and should always be held in the safest of place: your own brain.

So of course, he had refused her offer, no matter his empty fridge and empty heart. “I’ll manage, it’s ok.” He had said and he sees again in a flash the way she had retreated in her seat, desperate to learn that she had definitely failed each one of her former students.

The war had made soldiers out of them, but behind closed doors Minerva had made children out of them. Hiding in her office, crying about failed missions or sudden pregnancies; screaming about the injustice of this era, the ineffable darkness and void running in their ranks, she had sat and listened. Like a beacon of hope, her firm voice had birthed the clearest trails in their minds.

When they felt Albus stabbing them in the back, Minerva was there to heal the aches with biscuits and tea. Remus knows that she sacrificed as much as them all, if not more. Her soul was made of them, even if she tried not to care too much, they were the fruits of her morals.

Stubbornly, she had even gone to every funeral.

The Prewetts, Marlene, Mary, Benjy, Dorcas, Dedalus, Caradoc.

Lily, James, Peter.

They had stayed side by side, Remus and her, the survivors, under the hottest skies and the coldest storms. She had stood under his umbrella as he had held her elbow, never commenting on the salted drops that would sometimes manage to break through the veil and spells that were supposed to keep their bodies dry. Those were the ones that stained his clothes and left marks he wanted to burn away with bleach. Throw in a fire, watch the flames, then step into them.

“Do you need anything?” Minerva asks, now, her hands clasped in front of her beautiful dark robes.

He shakes his head with obvious fondness, eyes closed and lips pressed into a thin line. What he needs she can’t provide. What he needs is for the pain to stop because everything hurts so fucking much. Fuck the full moons, fuck his body, fuck the scars, fuck the wars. Fuck Sirius for killing everyo-

“I’ll make you a cuppa.” She moves, determined to interrupt a trail of thoughts that he knows she didn’t hear, yet he catches a glint of fidgeting around her fingers and it suddenly feels like she knows everything about him. He feels like he’s seven and the house smells like apple pie, and he can hear his mother humming in the kitchen while he rests on the living room’s couch. He feels like he’s fifteen and her office is the only place he can go when the whole castle is empty during the Winter holidays, but he has to stay because the full moon falls the night before Christmas and, Merlin forbid, his father is not there anymore to secure the house. The person who was there to pick him up at the Shack was Minerva, boots making muffled music on the snow as she levitates him back to a warmth he has forgotten about. He feels like he’s 25, poor and malnourished and homeless with no one left in the world but a shadow eaten by Azkaban’s madness. He feels like he owes everything to Minerva for giving him a life that killed him when it was taken away, yet still offered him the best things he has ever known.   
  


Friendship, trust, courage, love...

The woman in question is currently minding her own business in his kitchen, filling a cup with boiled water and then putting a tea bag in it. Earl grey it is then, he thinks with tears suddenly glistening in his eyes, not controling his beating heart anymore. He presses them shut, hoping to make it all stop. All those feelings must stop and yet a tear manages to roll down his cheek. And another. And too many others.

It takes one second for Minerva to finish their course with her thumb and, opening his eyes again, he whimpers unintentionally.

“Now now my boy,” she shushes while sitting at his side on the bed. “You have been so strong it’s ok to let it go.” The words wash over him like a soothing balm and unable to resist he leans towards her, nose pressed against her arm. “There there, rest some more, I’ll be there when you wake up.” And he knows she will, because contrarilly to Albus, she was never one for lies.

Minerva McGonagall was a woman with a heart made of gold and, in his deepest misery, Remus Lupin saw himself going back to sleep to the sound of the Welsh lullaby his mother always sang at night. The only difference to it was the Scottish lilt that made the words dance in the air and the smell of dark tea clinging to her clothes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading this you have no idea how much it means to me <333
> 
> Comments do add thousands of years to writers’ life expetency (i dont remember the word and im too lazy to look it up shit)


End file.
